Increasingly, services and communication are achieved over the Internet and the World-Wide Web (WWW). Geographical location is becoming irrelevant with respect to network connectivity. Furthermore, the physical devices used by individuals to communicate and conduct business are increasingly becoming transparent through machine virtualization techniques and miniaturization.
In a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) system, virtual machines are spawned or instantiated on demand. The identity of a virtual machine is established when it is instantiated. In a typical VDI system, after the Virtual Machine (VM) is instantiated, a user gets access to the console through either a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) or a Virtual Network Computing (VNC) protocol over a secure tunnel. The VM identity (typically the Internet Protocol (IP) address and communication port number combination) keeps changing when the VM goes up and down, so do the identities of the resources on the virtual machines. It is a challenge to transfer the resource (for example a file) on these VMs to other machines in a virtual cloud in a secure manner while adhering to policies. It is also challenging to retrieve a resource that is present on the VM from an external system.
Another challenging scenario is that in a VDI system, it is too big a task for an administrator to manage the access policies for the resources on the VMs. It becomes a common requirement that the owner of the VM needs to decide which resources should be shared and which ones should not be. Think of a Windows® user sharing a file on his/her system and setting read/write permission for a particular user or group of users. In a VDI system, it is a challenge to do the same task if the user who is accessing a shared/permitted resource is from an external system (external to the VM).